David Pryce-Jones om Naipaul

Skärmdump från Svenska Akademiens hemsida

Vad har sagts om V.S. Naipaul efter hans bortgång? David Pryce-Jones text i National Review är mer läsvärd än de flesta. Han avslutar:

 Vidia the writer had complete inner certainty. Inevitably he generated controversy, but he hardly bothered to read what was written about him or to respond to it. Nadira, whom he married after the death from cancer of Pat, filled his final years with grace. On the morning when the Swedish Academy announced his Nobel award, I rang to congratulate him. “Oh, you’ve heard of my little spot of luck, have you.” Nadira and he invited me to accompany them to Stockholm. The moment we reached the hotel, Vidia was swept off to a television studio. 

On the program with him were two previous Nobel winners, Nadine Gordimer and Günter Grass. They were agreeing that poverty is the whole motivation of Islamist terror. Vidia shot back that like millions of others he came from a poor family and did not commit terror. Infuriated by the liberal twaddle, he went to his room without dinner. About 2,000 people attended the ceremony, and Vidia was instructed to speak to them for not more than three or four minutes. On a podium, he then held up his watch, whose strap had just broken, and said that Julius Caesar invading Egypt had slipped on the sandy beach. An omen! Getting up, Caesar rallied his officers, “What I have, I hold.”Vidia was a free spirit. 

Just där och då framstod Nadine Gordimer and Günter Grass som intellektuella pygméer. De förstod ingenting då och deras likar förstår ingenting idag. Skulle de konfronteras har de samma förklaring: fattigdomen! De har inte ens förstått att islamismen är en politisk-religiös ideologi som bygger på hat formulerat i sharia-traditionen. Den har ingenting med fattigdom att göra. Den är en krigsförklaring och det förstod Naipaul. Orsak? Som artikeln avslutas: "Vidia was a free spirit".